Someone on reddit mentioned an energy shield and reflective blocks. I said, what about a block that can parry bullets and send them back?

Dunno how to approach this. Perhaps it has 1 hp of reflective layer it gives to surrounding blocks and you can pump fire to restore it? Or does it bat in front of you? It would have to hit a decent space in front of you but is that OP?

For the block that can parry attacks, I think that it would have to be "Ready'd up" before reflecting a shot; the player would have to press space on the round they reflect a bullet/beam. If this is too OP, then maybe the parry would come out one move later, this would have to create a cooldown, but it could be used when the player moves a space after activating the parry block.

Example: the player sees a bullet coming towards them and they activate their Parry block. If the bullet was 2 spaces away after they activated their parry block, then they would move up towards it and it would run into the parry. If it was 1 space away after they activated their parry block, then they could either press space again, or move into the bullet and have it run into the parry block. However, the bullet will not be reflected if it hits the parry right after the player activates it, due to the delay

This example is assuming that the parry only works if the bullet runs into the block itself, not the block in front of it.

The reflected bullet will probably have to spawn inside of the parry block to prevent bugs.

This parry effect you're describing sounds like some kind of force wall you're lumping in front of you. I think it would have to exist on the solid layer so it can absorb effects and operate independently.

Sounds complicated. How would you figure out what it does and how would the enemy AI be able to predict several turns in advance to use it? What happens if you just spam it?

As an example: The ships spam astro-fac for two turns when they use it. I found that simply reacting wasn't enough to block a threat - the gun that made the bullet is still aimed at the ship. But add a load of other blocks and the ship starts tooting it's guns like crazy, just to feed the astro-fac's demands.

I'm probably misinterpreting your idea, but factoring multi-turn events into an AI that's looking after a group of weapons that do different things is a world of nope.

Most of AI is about assigning a score to your goals. You need to know what that score is before you can apply a solution to it.

The game currently uses several heat maps generated by "threats" and acting entities. The ships poll their blocks and react to immediate threats and opportunities.

The main flaw is that they act from the core and move towards your core. I need to add getting the whole glom to look at each direction it could move as well as what advantage is gained by firing. I'm thinking of a democracy. That's more or less what's currently happening but a lot of blocks have veto, and just override any other concern. By building a score for each block's possible actions, I could then adjust the vote based on which blocks have the best utility.

This is something I'd have to do before even considering a neural net because I need data to put into that neural net. I doubt I'll use a neural net, I wouldn't know where to start - and I say this having programmed several classic neural nets in the past.